


Double Blind

by Reyemile



Series: Seeing One Another [6]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:46:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21655480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reyemile/pseuds/Reyemile
Summary: The same move. A different landscape. Lila Rossi, Scarlet Moth, and Mayura make a familiar attack under unfamiliar circumstances, and the result is chaos, pain, and the first real test of Marinette and Kagami's relationship.
Relationships: Juleka Couffaine/Rose Lavillant, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug/Kagami Tsurugi
Series: Seeing One Another [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1511747
Comments: 144
Kudos: 521





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi folks! If you're discovering this fic for the first time, it's part 6 of a series--click "previous work" to start from the beginning.
> 
> If you're rejoining us from a previous installment, then welcome back, and enjoy the penultimate story in Seeing One Another!

Something was disturbing the pristine beauty of Marinette’s sleep, a shrill, piercing noise drilling through her cocoon of blankets and pillows. It wasn’t her alarm; she’d learned to sleep through that excruciating noise months ago. It was… her phone?

“Uggggggh,” she moaned. Burrowing her face into the pillows to blot out the horrific blight that was the sun, she flailed her hand around her nightstand. Her alarm clock fell first, then her lamp, then her house keys. At last she heard the telltale thump of her phone hitting carpet, traced the power cord from the wall to the floor, and picked it up. 

“Hullo?” she asked, blearily

“Hello, beautiful.” 

“Ka-Kagami?” Heart pounding, Marinette tried to sit up. The blankets wrapped around her legs made that challenging, and instead she ended up joining her lamp and keys on the ground. “Oof. Kagami! You’re p--p--pretty too and why are you calling me?”

“My schedule today is booked solid from morning until bed. My only opportunity for contact with you is this courtesy wake-up call,” she said. “I’m aware of your tendency towards tardiness. I am no longer judgmental about it, now that I understand the root cause, but I nevertheless would see you overcome it.”

Marinette had in fact slept late nearly every morning for the past _three_ years, and Ladybug was only a minor factor in the equation. But Kagami didn’t need to know that.

“Oh. That’s…” She yawned, big and loud. Kagami laughed, and Marinette felt like she was _supposed_ to be mad, but her head was filled with a mixture of fuzzy sleep and fluffy romance. “...that’s sweet of you.”

Something beeped in the background. “And my shower has warmed up to temperature. I must go. I lo- umm…”

“You can say it,” Marinette said faintly. “As long as you’re fine waiting a while for me to say it back.”

Kagami chuckled. “I’ve been training for nineteen-year-old me to win an Olympic medal since I was seven. Delayed gratification is my lifeblood. I love you, Marinette, and I grant you all the time in the world to return that feeling. But enough sentiment. Have a pleasant day!”

“You too!” Marinette said. 

Marinette had been awake, wracked with anxiety, until midnight. Her sleep had been interrupted three times by vivid dreams, and the struggle to hold on to fast-forgotten fragments of those nocturnal images. They mostly involved Adrien ( _who_ _only loves the mask and not the real me, remember that!_ ), but the heartbroken faces of Chat Noir and Luka weighed most heavily upon her. She wasn’t sure how to tell either of them that she was in a relationship, though she knew she had to. 

Despite all that, she bounced through her morning routine. 

_Cons to this relationship: Major stress, breaking people’s hearts, and risk of bigotry._

_Pros: waking up like this every morning._

Marinette gave Tikki a one-fingered high-five on her way to the mirror. Tikki, enjoying the break from her role as emergency backup alarm, slapped back, then returned to nibbling on a slightly-stale cookie. Marinette put her hairbands on, checked that her pants were properly cuffed, and made for the trapdoor down to the house.

She almost beat her mother’s own wake-up call. “Marinette, sleepy-head, time to---” Sabine blinked in surprise when her fully-dressed and mostly-awake daughter opened the door and greeted her with a smile. “--get out of bed? Well, what a pleasant surprise! What’s got you up this fine morning?”

“My girlfriend!” Marinette said.

Her mother’s smile no longer reached her eyes. 

“Oh, so Alya called you?” Sabine said, backing down the ladder.

_Kagami loves me,_ Marinette reminded herself in an effort to stay positive. Her shoulders slumped. She tucked a hand into her purse, and Tikki gave her index finger a motherly hug. “Not that kind of girlfriend. You know who I meant, maman.” 

They walked in silence down the bedroom floor to the kitchen, where Sabine had arranged several misshapen pastries that couldn’t be sold next to a basket of fruit, a carafe of milk, and a box of her favorite cereal. Marinette breezed past the place setting, snagging an apple and a leaky eclair as she went. “Marinette, aren’t you going to--” Sabine said, but Marinette hurried on to the stairs.

Tom stood behind the register, finishing a sale. The bakery was otherwise empty; the pre-workday breakfast rush was an hour away. And with nothing tethering him to the counter, he put his massive body between her and the door, trying to be friendly but only making her morning worse. He wrapped his hands around her in a warm hug. Marinette didn’t hug back. 

“Sweetie?” Tom asked. “Is something wrong?”

Sabine caught up and answered for her. “Just the Kagami thing again, dear. She’ll get over it.”

“I won’t!” Marinette shouted into her father’s chest.

“Sabine, my love,” Tom said hesitantly. “Are you absolutely sure you’re reading this situation correctly?”

_That_ was enough to earn him a hug back, not that she could get her arms far around his barrel rib cage. “She’s not, papa. I’m serious about this. I like Kagami, and she--” _loves_ “--likes me back. We’re genuine about this. We both want it to work.”

Sabine touched Marinette’s shoulder. Marinette drew away as far as papa’s hug would let her. Sabine sighed. “I’m absolutely sure, Tom. I’ve seen this before, in teens and in women twice her age. I know you want to believe her, my love--”

“I _do_ want to believe her. She’s my daughter.” He stepped back and knelt down, his hands cupping her entire shoulders and his face at her eye level. “Marinette, I’ll give you one more chance to back down from this. Your mother is a wise woman, and I trust her. But you’re my darling girl, and I know you’d never lie to me. So if you look me straight in the eye and tell me that you mean it, I’ll put my honor as a baker on the line to defend you.”

“I mean it, papa.”

“Sabine,” Tom said, though his gaze was affixed to his daughter. “I believe her, and I’ll back it up with a _croquembouche._ ”

Marinette and Sabine gasped as one.

To a non-baker, betting a pastry might seem like par for the course for those living in a patisserie. But anyone who’d spent any time seriously working the pastry circuit knew the pain of _croquembouche._ Dozens and dozens of tiny puff pastries, stacked in an unstable tower and held together with toothpicks and glaze, ready to collapse at a mistimed sneeze and make the baker start all over again. It was, according to Sabine, “the most pointlessly frivolous of all pastries.” Tom disagreed; to him it had a point, namely that “rich people can’t get away with paying to whip peasants on posts, so they pay to see us broken and crying over _croquembouche_ instead.”

If Tom Dupain was offering to make a pastry tower, he meant _business._

“My little creampuff has her sights set on this Kagami girl, so she’ll _get_ this Kagami girl. They’ll still be together a month from now. I bet a _croquembouche_ on it.”

For a moment, Marinette thought Sabine was going to back down. But Tom would have none of that and went in for the kill. “I know it’s an unfair bet, since I can knock one off in two hours, but it will take you at least six…”

Fire ignited in Sabine’s eyes. “I’ll take your bet. You know I can bake a tower faster and tastier than you ever will.”

“You’ll get a chance to prove it when you lose,” Marinette said. “I can’t believe you’d bet against me. I… I…”

Sabine’s flame guttered and died. “I’m heading to the kitchen to clean up breakfast,” she said, vanishing back to the staircase.

Marinette stared at her toes. She was back at 50% of her parents on her side, which was a step in the right direction, but was 50% less than she wanted. “Papa? Thanks for standing up to me.” 

“Your mother’s making a mistake, I think,” Tom said. “But don’t forget that you love her, and she loves you. In fact, she got something for you. She ordered it online the day you got back from the Tsurugi estate.”

He got up and went back to the register, finding a small handheld device on a shelf underneath the counter. He offered it to her and she took it. A spool of blue tap sat at the top of a pistol grip, with a small digital screen and and even smaller keypad. “A label maker? We have one of those,” Marinette asked, unclear about the purpose of the mundane gift.

“Just try it,” said her father.

Marinette was confused, but she went along with it, typing in _chocolate eclair._ She hit enter, and the tape wound through the device with a grinding noise. _Blank?_ she thought, as the blue plastic strip came out the front without visible lettering. But then she notices the faint highlights of indentations and brushed it with her uncalloused left hand. _Not blank. Braille._

“You told us that you wanted Mme. Tsurugi to feel welcome here, so we--” Tom started to say. 

Despite the size differential, Marienette almost bowled him over with a hug. “Thank you, papa!”

“Thank your mother, dear,” he corrected. “It was her idea.”

“Maybe in a month, once she’s lost the bet and eaten some crow.”

Tom laughed and patted his daughter’s back. “I’m sure you want to head out, but before you go…”

“I’ll label the glass!” Marinette said. She hopped off to the left, the cookie section, and started typing labels, challenging herself to proofread each one with her eyes closed before pasting them on the display.

\------

Her self-imposed rule about proofreading was good practice. She was very slow and forgot a third of her letters half of the time, but she could already feel improvement from the rote practice of checking each label after she typed it. That same rule, however, cost her the whole morning, and now Marinette was dashing to school, late as usual. 

What was unusual was Alya dashing beside her.

“Got an anonymous tip on the Ladyblog,” Alya said, handspringing past a bench. 

_When did she start doing parkour?_ Marinette thought, trying to keep up. 

“Normally I skip those, but this one said it was right out front of school, so figured I’d give it a shot.” Alya hopped over the railing to the stairs up to class, landing three steps up and sprinting the rest of the way two steps at a time. Marinette, wearing tractionless flats, threw herself directly _into_ the railing to arrest her momentum before following her best friend upwards. “No payoff, but no real loss.” 

She burst through the door, Marinette hot on her heels. “We’re not late!” They said simultaneously.

No one answered.

The two girls quickly took in the scene in the class. Rose, in tears, and Lila, looking offended but faintly smug, were both standing in the center aisle of the class. The rest of the class stared at the two of them in various stages of disbelief and anger. And Mlle. Bustier, ordinarily kind as could be, looked irked and slightly injured by Alya and Marinette’s unceremonious entry.

“Alya, Marinette,” the teacher said. “Please find your seats. Quietly. Rose, Lila, my last instruction stands. To the principal’s office with both of you. He’ll get to the bottom of those test answers.”

“Wait, test ans--” said Alya.

“Quietly!” repeated Mlle. Bustier.

They did, and Lila and Rose left, and Marinette felt a sickening mix of fear and anger take hold in her chest. “Alya,” she whispered. “Any chance Lila was your anonymous tipster?”

“She wouldn’t do something like that--” Alya said. Marinette’s nails dug into Alya’s arm. “--or that’s what I _would_ have said, before the eyepatch thing. It’s a pretty far fetched theory, but it can’t hurt to check. I’ll see if I can trace the IP address when I get to a computer.”

Marinette started to sit, but a faint motion caught the corner of her eye. Juleka. She wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t doing anything, but she was rocking back and forth in her seat. Steadily, forward and back, in a motion that looked to Marinette’s untrained eye to be _very_ unhealthy.

Marinette raised her hand. “Mlle. Bustier? May I move to sit with Juleka for today’s class?”

Whatever was going on with the poor girl, the teacher saw it as well. Mlle. Bustier nodded, and Marinette picked up her things.

“You okay?” she whispered when she got to her new seat.

Juleka shook her head.

“Wanna talk about it?”

Head shake.

“I’ll take notes. You can copy them later?”

Head nod.

Something was _terribly_ wrong. But until class got out, there was nothing that could be done.

\-----

The loudspeaker crackled. “Juleka Couffaine, please report to the principal’s office.”

“Mlle. Bustier, may I--”

“She can walk by herself, Marinette. Let’s get on with our lesson.”

Juleka shuffled out with the demeanor of a widow and the grace of a walking corpse.

\----

After that, class was interminable. Marinette had been trapped in the classroom during Akuma attacks, and even those lectures felt short by comparison. A million scenarios ran through Marinette’s mind, even including a few where Lila somehow wasn’t to blame. But class ended with Marinette no closer to a solution than before.

Marinette made sure she was first out of her seat so she could get to Alya before the foot traffic blocked her. “Do you have any idea--”

Alya pointed at the door. “We’re about to find out.”

Lila was standing in the open doorway. She had a bandage wrapped around her knee, a limp in her gate, and crocodile tears running down her face. 

“H--hi, guys,” she said, overacting to the fullest. “I’m… going home for the day. I wanted to say ‘goodbye.’”

Various caring murmurs, “are you okay” and “what happened” and “you’ll be back tomorrow,” wafted from various parts of the room--disturbingly, including Alya.

“It’s… it was horrible. Rose… she pushed me down the stairs!” Lila wailed.

Alya’s hand slapped across Marinette’s mouth to stop her from shouting. Marinette nearly bit her to get her off, until until Alya said in her ear, “Not ‘til we can prove it. Let her talk.” 

Plenty of others were equally disbelieving, though willing to grant Lila the benefit of the doubt. “This must be a mistake!” Mylene argued. “Rose would never do something like that. She’s the nicest girl I know!”

“Yeah, she’s sweet as her name.” Adrien wasn’t quite accusatory, but at least he was speaking up. “You didn’t just trip?”

“No,” Lila said. “She… she pushed me. She was trying to hurt me!”

Alya’s gag had given her enough breathing room to not scream her lungs out, but Marinette had had enough. She pulled Alya’s hand down. “And why would she do that?” she asked.

Lila didn’t break character. Staring at Marinette with a hurt that was almost plausible, she said, “I’m… I’m not sure that I should say it with you here. You keep calling me a liar…”

“Because you… ow!” An elbow, courtesy Alya, interrupted her. “I haven’t called you a liar.” _Not so far today,_ she mentally amended.

“You have before, and I’m afraid that you’ll say something even meaner this time. That you’ll accuse me of something ridiculous like picking off your friends one by one to isolate you!” 

Marinette’s lungs froze in her chest. _Oh. Oh God. That_ is _what you’re doing. And you’re gloating about it in front of the whole class. And…_

Alix spoke up again. “She would never say something so crazy, Lila, and if she did, we wouldn’t believe her.”

_And it’s working._

“It’s… if it wasn’t for Marinette, I’d leave things alone,” Lila said, melodramatically covering her eyes with her arm. Then she limped over to a chair. The limp was _wrong_ , Marinette knew from a plethora of banged knees and sprained ankles, but she was the only one watching Lila’s gait. Once seated, she pulled out her phone. “But I’m afraid of what she’ll say and I need you all to believe me. Rose… she has a reason to hate me. Even though it was all a great big misunderstanding. And to answer your next question, Marinette: yes, I can prove it!”

Marinette glared daggers. “You can?”

“I can.” Hiding her smirk in her phone screen, she said, “I was going to meet Juleka for coffee last week. Since I know so many people in the music industry, I thought I’d offer to help her with her band. But I got hung up, and couldn’t make it, and worse, my phone dropped connection!” She flashed a chat log at the class. Superficially, it matched the story. A few back-and-forth bubbles, then several failed-to-send error messages, then a blast of replies all arriving at once. Of course, she moved it too quickly for anyone in the class to read the actual text for confirmation.

“I thought to myself, ‘oh no, Lila, she’s going to be so mad! You’ll owe her chocolates to apologize!’ But then I got a voicemail from her, and I realized things had gone way farther than I’d ever intended and Juleka was totally misreading the situation. I hope she forgives me for airing our dirty laundry, but…” 

As Lila started to play the message, Marinette thought back to the private lunch she’d had with Rose and Juleka, and to the despairing warning that Juleka had given: “You might forget that girls can be just as cruel as boys.” Her eyes widened and the visceral reaction to Lila’s _evil_ stunned her, and she was too slow to stop Lila from hitting play.

“Lila,” said Juleka’s recorded voice from the speaker. “I texted you a bunch and… this is my first date with a girl, and I’m being stood up?”

“How _dare_ you! Give me that!” Marinette screamed. She slithered free from Alya and lunged for the mobile phone. But Nino was moving as soon as Marinette started to pull from Alya -- _those two are in such perfect synch! --_ and he had his hands around her waist hushing “whoa, girl” before she got there. Her fingertips just barely brushed the phone.

Lila acted like she’d been struck, nursing her ‘injured’ hand and tossing her phone over her head. It landed under one of the desks, out of easy reach, and continued to play.

“Rose… Rose is never going to love me back. I thought you understood what it’s like for me to be lonely. I thought we could be normal girls going on normal dates and doing normal girlfriend things. But you’re not here. I… I hope you’re not hurt, but also I kind of hope you _are_ hurt, even though I know that’s horrible, because at least if you’re hurt you’d have a reason to not be here. Please, please call me, Lila. I… I’m going to have one more cup of coffee before… before I give up on you. Before I give up on finding anyone. G-goodbye.”

Lila sobbed into her arms. “I was waiting for the right moment to try to make things up to poor, poor Juleka! But I guess Rose _was_ interested in her all along, and she decided to get revenge. And I can’t blame her. I asked her parents and the principal not to punish her harshly, since she was acting out of love--”

Help came to Marinette from an unexpected quarter. “You did _what_?” shouted Nathanael, horrified. 

Lila was a good actress, but she wasn’t a method actress. Her superficial emotional state was supported only by her concentration, and thus it was easily broken. “You’re mad... that I helped her?” she asked, forgetting to cry.

He nearly rushed her, too, but Ivan and Kim held him back. “I’m mad that you _outed_ her! She was in the closet for a _reason,_ you insensitive _bitch_!”

For all her faults, Lila was adaptable. She donned her cloak of faux-guilt quickly. “Oh, _no,_ ” she said, hands on her cheeks. “What have I _done?_ I only wanted to help!”

“We know that,” said Mylene, who only had the courage to speak because she was half hidden behind Ivan. “We’ll all try to make things right. We believe you.”

“Speak for yourself!” Nathanael said. Marinette thought Rose’s situation must directly parallel to his own, or else to Marc’s. “She’s so careless that she’ll accidentally _ruin someone’s life!_ I don’t know why we’d believe her story about the stairs, either!”

“I calculate a very low chance that she’s lying,” Max said.

“Max?” Said Markov, hovering up out from his hiding spot in Max’s bag. “You created me, and you’re my best friend, so I say this with utmost respect: you need to double-check your calculations.”

The class started to devolve into bickering, and Lila hid her face again--she was fuming, Marinette presumed, at the monkey wrench Nathanael had tossed in the gears of her elaborate plan. 

“I’m gonna punch her,” Marinette said.

Alya put herself between Marinette and Lila. “Girl, my brain’s five steps behind and still catching up, but I guarantee that punching her does _not_ help.”

“Don’t care, gonna do it.”

“Alya’s right,” said Adrien, who had snuck up behind her.

“Well maybe I wouldn’t _have_ to punch her if people had supported me the _first_ time I said she was a liar!” Marinette hissed. Adrien and Alya both cringed with guilt, and the sight was enough to make Marinette want to apologize. 

She didn’t get the chance, because that was when a swarm of scarlet butterflies burst through the window and blanketed the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to MiniMinou and RGT for feedback.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Homophobia and emotional abuse.

“Princess Justice.” 

Hawk Moth’s voice was slick as an oil spill, and just as toxic. 

“No,” Marinette said. “I can fight back. I can resist this. Just think about…”

_Think about Juleka, quivering in her seat._

_Think about Rose, outed against her will._

_Think about Lila, bragging about her lies for all to hear._

“...I’m listening.”

The neon glow of his power dimmed her vision, but she could see shadows of her class. Some ducked or hid from the butterflies, while others were shouting in conversations much like her own. A few were already transformed. 

“Princess Justice, I am Scarlet Moth. I will give you the power to see that justice is done for your friends--”

“--who you’ve probably akumatized already,” she said. Her hatred of Lila, amplified by the Butterfly’s magic, blocked off her every positive memory. It couldn’t block off her hatred of Hawk Moth. “You think turning them will get me on your side?”

“Of course not,” he said smoothly. He was agreeing with her? “If they have to find their own justice, then that proves beyond doubt that they live in an unjust world. No, Princess Justice, for your sake and for theirs, you must bring justice on their behalf. They deserve to know that they will be protected, do they not?”

She thought that Scarlet Moths’ argument was completely wrong, but for the life of her, she couldn’t come up with a single reason why. “...you’re right. I have to show them that wrongs will be righted. And I’d do it, except that you’re protecting the transgressor! Who will Lila be this time, Hawk Moth? Will she be Volpina? Chameleon? Or someone totally new?”

“She’ll be nobody,” Hawk Moth said, and from the corner of her glowing eye, Marinette saw the black energy abandon Lila. And then Lila leapt--was she trying to catch it the butterfly? No, even she couldn’t be that far gone--and then she ran, and she was _getting away--_

“She’s escaping!” Marinette cried.

“She will never escape you, Princess Justice. All I ask is the Miraculous of Ladybug and Chat Noir--”

“No!” Even to avenge Rose and Juleka, that price was too high. Ladybug was going to shatter Chat Noir’s heart when he learned about her new relationship. Compounding that by destroying his career at a hero? He was her best friend, better even than Alya. Her loyalty to him would not be suppressed, not even by Scarlet Moth at his full power. “You won’t hurt him!”

“Your trust in him shines a beacon,” Hawk Moth said. “But only in _him_ , yes?”

Ladybug. Who was her. Who was a failure. Who couldn’t protect her friends from a simple liar, who couldn’t save her friend from simple heartbreak, who couldn’t push back from the simple manipulations of the simple villain who’d gotten right into her simple head. “Yes. Only for him. Ladybug can rot.”

The butterfly flared over her face, and she could feel his grin in her soul. “Then we have a deal?”

“Yes.” Marinette took off her left earring and reached for her right. “We have a deal. You’ll have Ladybug’s Miraculous in your hand, I guarantee it, just as soon as I finish _wringing Lila Rossi’s scrawny neck!_ ”

“Excellent, Princess Justice! You will be my greatest Akuma ye--Catalyst, no!”

And just like that, she was free.

Panic, and hyperventilation, set in rapidly. She’d almost given in. They’d almost lost. What had just _happened?_

The rest of the class seemed similarly shook. A few had already recovered, though. Nino was helping Alya to her feet. And someone was holding onto Marinette’s arm, too, telling her to slow her breathing down. 

Oh, it was Adrien. 

_Oh it was Adrien._

“Adrien, are you okay?” she asked, jerking around to face him and conveniently breaking off the distracting physical contact between them. 

“I’m fine. The butterflies left me alone,” he said. He was withdrawn, limbs and head huddled in like a turtle hiding in an invisible shell. “Don’t know why. I’m practically nauseous with guilt. I should never have let this happen, and now Rose is--”

_Rose._

“I have to go,” Marinette said.

Alya was back upright and close enough to hear. “Marinette, what are you--”

“I can’t let Rose face her parents alone,” Marinette said with increasing vehemence. She’d almost lost, she’d almost betrayed the whole city, and she was going to make it up to all of Paris if she had to save it one citizen at a time. “I have to go. Alya?”

“Girl?”

Marinette whipped her arms around Alya and whispered in her ear from the bear hug. “Lila is lying about _everything_ . Please, please believe me. Even if it sounds true, even if you want to believe her, _it’s a lie._ And you’re the only one who can prove it.”

“I’ll… see what I can do,” Alya said, not fully persuaded, but willing to listen at last. 

Marinette broke the hug and ran for the door. Mlle. Bustier was there, pale and sweaty, returning from wherever she’d been when Lila pulled her dramatic reveal. “Marinette, where are you--”

“Cutting class. See you in detention!” she said, ducking under the teacher’s arms. Her knee buckled and she made a forward roll. It probably looked cool, since most of the resultant bruises would be under her clothing. She stood and lurched forward, almost missed catching herself on the stair’s railings, slid down said railings, and made a beeline for the front door.

\------

Rose lived in a highrise apartment. Marinette had been there once or twice for fittings, so she knew the way. However, Ladybug had a slightly harder time, since floor and apartment numbers weren’t typically printed on the outside of buildings. 

Several swings later, and two stops on incorrect, identically furnished patios, she found the place. She couldn’t see Rose, but she saw Rose’s parents, red-faced and shouting and very obviously keeping someone cornered against a wall. 

Ladybug swung feet-first in through the window. 

She landed amidst shards of glass in a classic superhero pose. Not the fist-on-hips glory of a hero like Majestia, though, or the cool three-point crouch of a hero like Victory. No, this pose was stolen from the likes of Dark Ranger or Revenger. One foot forward and one knee on the ground, leaning on a clenched fist for balance, staring straight down into the wreckage of her own landing. Then, slowly, her body rose. Her downward gaze did not. She waited until she was fully upright to brush the glass off her glove and take in the scene.

Rose was indeed flat against the wall, tear-swollen face staring past knees hugged to her chest. Ladybug stepped up to her, offered her a hand, helped her to her feet, and turned to her parents. 

Valencia Lavillant was tall and willow thin. She had the body of a model but not the face, having frowned so much that she’d pressed permanent creases into the corners of her mouth. She wore a modest pantsuit and kept her hair in a tight, graying bun. 

Richard Lavillant was her opposite, short and broad. He was a few scant centimeters taller than his daughter, but shoulder to shoulder his measure was on par with Tom Dupain or Adrien’s gorilla of a bodyguard. With his unkempt blond beard sticking out in all directions, he looked more like one of Tolkien’s dwarves than a real man. 

“Ladybug!” he said, once the shock had passed. “What are you doing here? Do we need to evacuate?”

“There’s no supervillain, yet,” Ladybug said. “But a swarm of rogue akuma at Dupont. I can’t ordinarily help people _before_ the akuma preys on their darkest emotions, but in this case, I had some advance warning that there was a crisis in the making.” She turned to her classmate. “Rose, are you all right?”

“She’s not,” Mme. Lavillant answered for her. “She’s hurt and confused and she’s physically lashing out at her classmates. I assumed it was just teenage foolishness and the corruption of the modern world, but… could it be an akuma? I can’t think of what else could make my sweet angel behave this way!”

“Please, Ladybug,” M. Lavillant agreed. “Bad enough she assaulted a girl, but she did it because she says… she thinks... she’s in love with another _girl_ ! Our daughter is _normal,_ or at least, she was until a few days ago. This… this must be the work of some evil magic, right? Can you purify her? Can you fix whatever was done to her?”

Ladybug’s fury burned so hot that for a moment, she wanted Scarlet Moth’s akuma to find her again. 

“You _cannot_ be serious,” she hissed. 

“I… of course not! You have bigger things to worry about than one child,” said Richard, cowed by the anger roiling off her in waves but utterly in the dark as to its cause. “I know that she’ll get better with prayer, we’ll fix this ourselves. You’ll start praying again, won’t you, my sweet, _normal_ girl?”

“I… I…” said Rose, hardly able to inhale, let alone find words. 

Mme. Lavillant took her turn to pile it on. “And even if Ladybug can’t use her magic on you, she’ll join us in praying, won’t she? She’ll pray for these dark urges to leave you alone?”

“I don’t think my girlfriend would like it very much if I did,” Ladybug answered.

It took five seconds for anyone to speak. Ladybug could tell, because in the quiet, she could hear all five ‘ticks’ of the second hand of the kitchen clock.

“Ladybug,” Rose said, with beams of her soul’s light peering out from the black clouds surrounding her. “You’re…?”

“One of _them?_ ” Valencia Lavillant interrupted, and Ladybug was _so close_ to spinning around and decking her. “Ladybug, you’re a role model for girls in the city. How can you abuse your position like this? Acting like girls loving girls is normal--are you going to start telling my Rosie that the world is flat, or that Islam is France’s national religion? You have a responsibility to the children of this city!”

Richard backed up his wife, and was somehow even _worse._ “No wonder this city is gone to hell, if even its heroes are prone to such degeneracy! Rose, don’t let this freak fool you. You just have to _believe,_ and--”

“Enough!” Ladybug roared. “Rose, don’t--”

“But I _am_ a freak! I’m _not_ normal!” Rose wailed.

_No, no, no, don’t give up on me, Rose. I won’t lose you, not to this._ “Am I a freak, then?”

“I… I don’t think so?”

“And Juleka’s a freak, too?”

“Don’t mention--” Richard began. 

Ladybug put a fist through the kitchen table. He quieted down. 

“You can’t condemn yourself for liking girls without condemning Juleka as well,” Ladybug said softly. “And I can’t picture you doing that. Not willingly.”

“Of course she’s not a freak! But it’s different. I’m different! Or I shouldn’t be. I’m supposed to be like my parents, right? A good daughter? A good Catholic? I should make them proud, but I guess I never prayed hard enough, and Juleka can love who she loves but why does it have to be me?” And she was down again, back against the wall, huddled up in a bundle of misery. “You… you can’t save me from myself, Ladybug.”

Marinette didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what to do. But she did know where to go for a clue.

“Lucky Charm!” she shouted, throwing her yo-yo in the air. Sparkles of magic swirled and coalesced, and the red spotted item landed on the ground between them. 

Rose and Ladybug both blinked in surprise, but then Ladybug smiled and knelt. 

“Rose. Even though you’re not safe here, I can’t and won’t take you anywhere you don’t want to go. However, my Lucky Charm has never led me astray. When it sends a message like this…” Ladybug picked up the tri-corner captain’s hat and put in on her head. “...I try to listen. Do you want my help?”

“Young lady!” Valencia shouted. “You can’t throw away all the time and money and love we’ve spent raising you! It’s that music, isn’t it? Or the Jap cartoons? They tricked you into thinking these ‘lifestyles’ are okay, but don’t be fooled. It’s not too late to save yourself! There are therapies and camps that will fix you--”

With the last of her strength, Rose whispered, “please help me.” Then she broke down into incoherence. 

“My dear,” said Richard calmy, having come down from his explosive outburst. “If you leave, we may not be able to follow and help you.”

“I certainly hope not,” Ladybug growled. She gently lifted Rose into her arms, and looked over her head to address her fuming parents. “Let me make one thing clear. If you come after her, _I_ come after _you_.” 

She stepped over to the broken window and looked outside. There, the next building over, a cell tower high enough to get good rotation and stable enough to support two girls’ weight. That was her target. 

She stepped over once more, this time to an unbroken window. Her yo-yo splintered it into a thousand shards as she threw it towards the tower. Then, the classmates swung off into the Paris afternoon.

\------

Ladybug had two spots left on her earrings when she arrived at the _Liberty._

Anarka and Luka were seated on a bench on the deck on either side of Juleka, who was weeping into her hands. Anarka had her arm over her daughter’s shoulder; Luka was leaning his back against her, playing something soothing on his guitar. 

All three members of the Couffaine family looked up when Ladybug’s boots cracked against the deck. And when Ladybug let Rose down, Juleka let out a strangled cry.

The two of them were in each other’s arms before Ladybug could blink. 

“Ladybug,” Anarka said, slowly finding her feet. “What’s going on?”

“Rose needs a family,” Ladybug answered, offering the captain’s hat to the captain. Anarka took it, Ladybug smiled as much as she was able, which was very little. “I can’t explain the Lucky Charm. Fate, destiny, dumb luck, whatever. It told me she’d find family _here._ Not there.”

“I knew those scurvy bigots were trouble,” Anarka muttered, “but I never thought they’d get this bad.”

Ladybug looked at Juleka and Rose, neither of whom had managed to speak a single sentence. “They did. Rose might want to speak to her parents at some point. That’s okay. Her parents might want to speak to her before then. That’s _not_ okay.”

Anarka nodded slowly. “Luka?” she called.

“What’s up, mom?” he replied cautiously, as though he was afraid of how she’d answer.

“Weigh anchor.”

“Mom,” he said with a long-suffering sigh. His fingers made the strings of his guitar twang nervously. “We’re a houseboat, not a real boat. We’re barely seaworthy and we don’t have any kind of license--”

“Luka,” she snapped. “Your whole life, I've let you be free to be your own self. Today, for the first time in your life, I'm giving you an _order._ Weigh. Anchor.”

Luka plucked out the beginning chords of a sea shanty, then set his guitar down at the edge of the wooden bench. “Aye aye, _mon capitaine!_ ” He saluted lazily as he rose to complete his task. On his way aftward, he muttered, “Officer Raincomprix’s gonna have conniptions.”

Ladybug’s earrings beeped again. One spot. “I have to go. Captain?”

“I’ll go down with the Liberty to the bottom of the Seine before I let a hair be harmed on my girls’ heads,” she said. Her salute, unlike her son’s, was crisp and formal. 

Ladybug returned it. “ _Bon voyage, mon capitaine,”_ she said.

_“Bon voyage, mon superhero!”_

\-------

Marinette ended up detransformed in an alley. 

She’d thought she was safe on top of a low-rise office building, with the roof and a Gabriel-brand billboard blocking lines of sight, but soft chatter and the scent of cigarettes clued her in to the presence of workers on a rooftop smoking break. She’d used the last seconds of her transformation to rappel down the narrow gap between that concrete building and the red brick nextdoor. She’d fallen the last few feet, adding another bruise to her growing collection but blessedly missing a nearby stack of smelly black garbage bags.

This mission had been an unqualified success. She’d saved one friend. She’d helped another. She’d protected her identity while doing it, and the only real consequence would be a detention and a lecture from her parents. This was a win.

Yet she was bawling. 

She was weeping and crying and she knew why: because Lila, along with Hawk Moth and the Lavillants, had slapped her in the face with the ugliness of the world. And worse, Hawk Moth had shown her the ugliness in herself. He’d almost broken her. _Lila_ had almost broken her. 

And they could break her again, too. If Hawk Mother decided to send another Akuma right then and there, Marinette knew she wouldn’t have even a token of resistance left in her.

“Marinette?” Tikki said weakly. “Are you--”

“Cookies in the purse,” she mumbled, opening it and getting her phone out of the way. Where was she, even? In her dash to privacy she’d lost track. With shaky fingers, she opened a GPS app. It she was thirty minutes by public transit from school and home. Not too far under normal circumstances, but she couldn’t bring herself to even stand. 

“Marinette, are you all right?”

“I’m not,” she said. 

“That was painful.” Tikki was eating as fast as she could, wanting nothing more than to power back up so she could protect her ward once more. “But you saved her. That’s what matters.”

“Saving her only matters if she’ll heal,” Marinette said. 

“And she will!” Tikki insisted.

Marinette couldn’t disagree. “She will. She’s with people who really love her now, now. That’s what matters. Being with the one who loves you.”

Marinette pressed a button on her phone--‘share location with contact’-- and then scrolled through her contacts until she found Kagami’s stern self-portrait. She typed, ‘please help,’ hit ‘send,’ and went back to crying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to MiniMinou for feedback.


	3. Chapter 3

The first person to come to Marinette’s rescue was dressed not in a uniform jacket and plaid skirt, but in a hawaiian shirt and khakis. 

Marinette rubbed her teary eyes to make sure she was seeing correctly. “Master Fu?”

The old guardian wore a grandfatherly smile and hobbled down the dingy alley, leaning heavily on his cane for support and wheeling an ice cooler behind him. “I saw you come in and waited for you to come out, Marinette. This isn’t a suitable place for a young lady, even if she wants privacy.”

Tikki poked her tiny head out from Marinette’s purse. “We know,” she said. “I would have pushed harder for her to leave, but help is on the way.”

“Would you like some company until help arrives?” Fu asked.

Marinette used the brick wall behind her to stand. It was damp against her palm, and with a frown, she brushed damp detritus off the back of her shirt where she’d been leaning. “Yes, please. It might take a while for her to get here. I should probably text her to let her know it’s not an emergency anymore.”

“So there _was_ a true emergency?” asked Fu. “I saw Ladybug swinging around town, which is atypical during the school day, but my usual sources were silent about akuma attacks.”

The word ‘akuma’ triggered a flashback to Hawk Moth’s sickening recruitment, and Marinette’s own susceptibility. “We got lucky,” she said. “Hang on, let me send this message--”

Too late. Kagami’s arrival was heralded by the pounding of shoes on pavement. Fu hunched over a little further, ditching the role of the slowing but strong Master Fu in favor of his guise as the infirm Mister Fu, and Tikki ducked her head back in Marinette’s purse. When Kagami rounded the corner, she saw a perfectly mundane scene: Marinette crying in an ally, confronted by a strange old man.

Marinette thought she’d made a proper entrance into the Lavillant household. Kagami put her to shame. 

The far wall of the alley, the one with the brown stones, was lined with trash cans. Kagami leapt onto them and skipped across like they were stepping stones, balancing with grace Marinette would have been hard-pressed to imitate as Ladybug. At the end of the row, she kicked off the wall into an honest-to-god mid-air somersault. She landed in a low skid that brought her directly between Marinette and Fu. And when she stood, she pointed her fencing foil--because _of course_ she’d come armed--directly at Marinette’s perceived assailant. “Marinette, are you--”

Marinette hugged her, basking in her warmth and conveniently redirecting the aim of her weapon. “I’m fine. M. Fu was trying to help.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Not physically.”

“I see.” Kagami relaxed her sword arm and returned the embrace. “Fu. He’s the one who taught you meditation?”

“Yes, that’s him,” Marintte answered.

“Does he know about…?” Kagami didn’t complete her question. She didn’t need to. Marinette winced.

“You can’t ask that!” Marinette squeaked.

Kagami looked downwards in shame. “Of course. Please forgive my inexcusable carelessness.” Parting from Marinette, she turned and bowed deeply. “Master Fu, your meditation lessons have helped bring Marinette peace, and for that I am in your debt.”

He bowed a few degrees, an act of supreme deference when a man of his age and status could have simply nodded his head. “We both have a common interest in that girl’s happiness. Though my interest is by proxy--I’d hate for her to distract her parents from making the best macarons in all of Paris!”

Marinette smiled and bowed as well. “On behalf of my parents, your praise honors us.”

The Guardian started to make for the exit, pausing halfway there to turn his head. “I’ll be having tea and reading for the next few hours at the boulangerie across the street. Marinette, it seems a lot has happened in your life since last we talked.”

Marinette used her toe to draw a small circle in the dust in the ground. “Kagami and I might take a while, but if you’re still there, I’ll fill you in. There’s a lot to catch up about.”

“A while.” Fu stroked his pointed goatee. “Not _here,_ I hope? This alley is damp and rank.”

“Damp, rank, and _private_ ,” Marinette answered. 

“If you need privacy, then here we shall remain,” Kagami pronounced. “I believe the police officer following me lost my trail on the way here, so we should not be interrupted.” 

Marinette wanted to slap her face and groan at the extreme measures Kagami had taken. But she also wanted to blush and gibber, because Kagami had taken those measures for _her._

Fu responded jovially. “I’ll be sure to tell the officers that the girl with the sword went thataway,” he said, pointing his cane down the busy road towards the Seine. Then he waved and slowly tottered off towards his waiting tea, dragging the disguised Miracle Box behind him.

Once he was gone, Kagami slid her weapon into a belt loop on her skirt and grabbed Marinette’s shoulders. “What do you need?”

“I…” Marinette shut her eyes to cut off a fresh upwelling of tears. “I’m not sure.”

For the first time since they’d begun dating, Kagami’s voice bore the sharp edge of ice. “I skipped school and evaded the law to come to you, Marinette.”

“I know! I know, and I wouldn’t have called you here if I didn’t absolutely need you!” She threw herself at Kagami, whose strength and balance bore her easily. “I… lost. I got beaten. Hawk Moth won today.”

Kagami guided her down to a seated position on the filthy ground. _Oh well, I never liked these jeans anyway,_ thought Marinette.

“You say you lost, yet you are here and wearing your earrings.” Kagami was warm again. Well, warm by her standards--an observer without context would find her stiff and robotic, but Marinette knew by now what her true ice was like. 

“I got lucky,” Marinette sighed. “He overreached and his power backfired. He had a catalyst like the one he used to power up on Heroes’ Day, only this time it must have blown up in his face. But before then… I failed. I fell. The akuma came for me, and I said ‘yes’.”

“No hero is perfect,” Tikki said, re-emerging from the purse. Kagami jumped. Marinette didn’t blame her; the constant companionship took getting used to. “Every Ladybug can have vulnerable days, and after what you went through this morning…”

“Tikki-sama.” Kagami did her best to bow from her sitting position. “It was bad?”

“It was,” she said. “She really does need you, Kagami. I know human children have lots of rules and you may face punishment for being here. Marinette would _never_ make you suffer those consequences without good reason. I promise, she isn’t wasting your time.”

“I presumed as much, but I value your assurances. Marinette, do you want to talk about your day?”

She shook her head rapidly. Her pigtails reflected the blue sky as they bobbed. “Can we talk about your day instead?” 

In truth, Marinette didn’t particularly care about Kagami’s day. She didn’t _not_ care, either; friends, and couples, talked about their day all the time, and if something was important to Kagami then Marinette wanted to know about it. But she wasn’t yearning for a play-by-play of Kagami’s class schedule, of which teachers she liked and which classmates were flirting in which classes. 

What she wanted was to be _normal._ To know confidently that some things even Lila couldn’t ruin. To have proof that two people could be happy together, even if they were both girls. 

Proving Sabine wrong wouldn’t hurt, either. 

Marinette doubted that Kagami understood the full depth of Marinette’s particular needs, but the general thrust of ‘please be my girlfriend for a bit’ was obvious. Kagami adjusted their position so her shoulder was conveniently positioned by Marinette’s cheek. Marinette accepted the generously offered resting place for her head. 

“I went to school this morning determined to emulate your amazing kindness--”

“Please don’t,” Marinette said with an exasperated moan. “Talk to me normal. Don’t make stuff up to make me happy. And _especially_ don’t put me on a pedestal.” That was how Adrien fell in love with fake-her and ignored real-her, how Chat Noir fell in love with a perfect image… she swallowed the dark thoughts because Kagami didn’t need to know, but they stuck in her throat.

Kagami’s embarrassment was hardly detectable, but it was there. “Forgive me. I was being overdramatic. But also truthful. Your set an example for me, and I wanted to live up to it.”

“So you got to school late and tripped over the stairs?”

Marinette thought she’d spoken with a light tone, but from the squeeze Kagami gave her, she deduced it was bitterer than intended.

“I do wish I was more like you, sometimes,” Marinette continued. “Your drive, your certainty--I envy it.”

“But you don’t envy the stiff awkwardness of my friendships or my self-reproach in the face of simple failure,” Kagami stated. “Among the reasons I chose you as my target is that we are complimentary. We highlight each other’s strengths and offset each other’s weaknesses. Do you agree?”

In Marinette’s mind, she contrasted Kagami’s ghastly fake smile on their scavenger hunt with the brilliant, mischievous grin of her bakery trolling. And similarly, she compared a year of her own absolute inaction with Adrien to the thunderhead of admissions she’d shared openly with Kagami. “I do,” she said from the heart.

Kagami brushed her fingers through Marinette’s pigtail. “I’m aware of your failings. They are part of your charm. More importantly, they are dwarfed by your many positive qualities. One of those is what I sought to emulate today: your willingness to forgive, and to seek forgiveness when you’ve done wrong.” 

Marinette was exhausted in every sense of the word, but something about Kagami’s phrasing told Marinette to pay attention, so she pushed aside the tempting urge to nap on Kagami’s shoulder. “This is something _you_ want to talk about?”

“If it’s acceptable--”

“ _Always,_ ” Marinette said. She prayed it wasn’t going to be something soul-wrenching like the incident with Rose, but easy or hard, Marinette would be there for Kagami. 

Kagami nodded. “My school attracts young athletes. It doesn’t have sports programs of its own, but it is renowned for its willingness to bend over backwards with allowances for competitions and training. Doo Ri Han, one of my classmates, is a swimmer with Olympic potential.”

Kagami waited for acknowledgement from Marinette. Marinette gave it in the form of a nuzzle. Kagami continued. “Doo Ri and I shared a table at lunch. I said I had no friends before you and Adrien, but I was perhaps unfair to Doo Ri in saying so. Although we were never close, we shared enough to know that we lived lives that were nearly identical. Not just in the sense of being Asian athletes raised by tiger-mothers. Our love lives were parallel as well.”

“So she was interested in a swimming rival?” Marinette asked, trying to picture a stern Korean athlete trying to win the heart of another heartthrob swimmer.

“Not precisely a rival. The competitive differences between male and female swimmers is much more stark than in swordfighting. But like me, she had a competitor for her target’s affection. And in hindsight, her target was similar to Adrien: he was in love with the idea of a third girl, but not the girl herself. He never saw her true identity and pined instead after a fiction.”

The mystery girl and her mystery lover piqued Marinette’s curiosity, and that distracted her from Adrien, which was a good thing. The story sounded like something out of a romantic dramedy, comparisons to her own life notwithstanding. She concentrated on retaining as many details as possible, trying to suss out the full nature of the web of relationships Kagami described. “You mentioned forgiving. And seeking forgiveness. The two of you had a falling out?”

“Yes.” The arm Kagami had around Marinette squeezed tight. It didn’t hurt, but it conveyed Kagami’s own inner pain. “The complexity of their collective feelings ended in the rival’s akumatization, a particularly bad one that flooded the city. I’m sure you remember, since you saved us. And afterwards, things fell apart between me and Doo Ri. Her frustration led her to say unkind words to say about the mental state and emotional stability of the victims of Hawk Moth’s malice. She suggested that they should be shunned, or perhaps even institutionalized. I took her sentiment… personally.” 

Marinette couldn’t hold back her need to comfort Kagami, and gave her a gentle kiss on her lower cheek. “It’s okay to be hurt. She was cruel, beyond question.”

“I do not question if she was cruel. I question whether she was unforgivably cruel. I judged that she was. I cut off contact with her completely.” Kagami made a fist, and released it. “Now, I see that I judged harshly.”

“Oh.” Marinette could easily imagine the old Kagami, the _hard_ Kagami, making that decision. She sympathized. And more importantly, she also sympathized with the loneliness that had followed.

But Kagami wasn’t done. She gently grasped Marinette’s chin and turned their faces eye to eye. “I see that because _you_ made me see that. You and Alya… don’t mistake this for jealousy, because I know your feelings for her are platonic, but the bond between you has survived harsher mistakes than Doo Ri’s and come out stronger for the struggle. In hindsight, Doo Ri could have been _my_ Alya. Perhaps, with your aid, she might still be. I spoke to her today for the first time in months, to correct her misapprehensions about akumatization and to apologize for my overreaction.”

“How’d it go?” Marinette asked.

Kagami reciprocated the gentle cheek kiss. “I will find out tomorrow, I suppose. I was summoned before she could answer.”

“Oh no! I didn’t mean--” She wasn’t sure what how to say what she was about to say. Her thoughts were moving too fast for her tongue to keep up. But Kagami interrupted before the self-recriminations could escalate into an inescapable spiral.

“Don’t worry, Marinette. My reconciliation with Doo Ri is important, but it is not urgent. I chose today for amends because I was inspired, not because she was in immediate crisis.”

A love triangle certainly could precipitate a crisis. And just like with Rose--the memory still burned like a hot iron--an intervention at the right time could prevent untold misery. But Kagami was probably right, that whatever romance this Doo Ri girl had brewing was in a state of stasis. Kagami would have noticed if things had changed, right?

Well, at least, she would have noticed if the mental constructs of Doo Ri, her rival, and her love were accurate, but there was a lot of guesswork involved. The puzzle pieces of the multifaceted swimming drama still floated in Marinette’s tired mind like they were underwater.

But then, suddenly, one clue clicked. Her vision of the mess had been totally, utterly wrong, and a new, fully-formed image took its place. 

“Oh. The guy she was crushing on… it wasn’t Lê Chiến Kim, was it?”

Kagami tilted her head. “You follow high school swimming?”

“No, but his girlfriend Ondine was the only swimming akuma I fought. Syren came straight for us after she was evilised. Kim’s in class with me and Adrien.” And the more she thought of it, the more pieces fell into place. Kagami had said he was ‘in love with the idea of a third girl,’ and that sounded exactly right. The Chloe Kim had been crushing on bore zero resemblance to the Chloe that the rest of Mlle. Bustier’s class had to put up with on a daily basis. 

“Somehow, that detail never came up,” Kagami said with a small smile. It disappeared too quickly for Marinette’s liking. “Though if Kim did make his choice, then that compounds the damage from my error. I forsook Doo Ri when she was most in need of a friend.”

“And you’re trying to fix it now,” Marinette reassured her. “You can still help her get over the loss, and you can still save her from hurting anyone else’s feelings. Imagine if she’d said something like that directly to Kim--he was akumatized too, you know. It can happen to anyone, and I’m just realizing that this whole thing was a trick to get me to defend the victims of akumatization, wasn’t it?”

Marinette was irritated, but Kagami looked mystified. “That hadn’t occurred to me. Truly. I wouldn’t try to trick you--”

“I believe you,” said Marinette, fully assuaged. 

“Good,” said Kagami. She set her jaw. “But accidental or otherwise, it appears I have a point. You are hardly alone in falling to Hawk Moth’s manipulations. Whatever may have happened at your school this morning, the blame for the akuma lies on him. You’re hardly alone in falling to him.”

“But I’m _me_!” Marinette groaned. “I know you’re still ashamed about Riposte, so I’m sorry for bringing it up, but imagine if I tried to calm you down by saying you weren’t alone in falling to _Adrien._ It would have been meaningless to you. Other fencers aren’t to blame for Adrien beating them, because he’s a nearly peerless prodigy. But you’re different. You’ve spent your life training to be his match. He can beat the rest of the world, but he’s not supposed defeat Kagami Tsurugi. Just like Hawk Moth isn’t supposed to beat Ladybug.”

“And I was wrong to react that way,” Kagami said. “Facing a worthy opponent has changed my mindset. Now, when I lose, I treat it as an opportunity to learn and become greater.”

“When I lose,” Marinette replied, “Paris dies.”

An alley in busy Paris could never be truly silent, so Kagami’s quiet contemplation was accompanied by an indistinct buzz of cars, shouts, and footsteps, all mashed together by the funneling walls of the two buildings penning the two girls in. Marinette tried to let Kagami to her thoughts by picking out individual sounds from the din, but the vehicles roared together and the French words were impossible to pick apart. 

“I am at a loss for words,” Kagami finally said. “You called me here for help, but--”

“You’re helping,” Marinette answered quickly. “You’re helping by being here. I’m not expecting you to throw a Miraculous Cure at my life and solve everything. I just needed a reminder. When… when I’m ready to talk about this morning, you’ll understand.”

“Take all the time you need,” Kagami said patiently. “But if I may ask, a reminder of what?”

“Of love,” Marinette said. She wrapped herself around Kagami, attempting to push as many of her surfaces against Kagami’s as possible, to maximize the physical contact of their awkward side-by-side seating. “It sounds like you’re trying to be a better person because of what you see in me. And that’s mutual. You make me want to be a better person, Kagami.”

She smiled. “As you are already the Hero of Paris, I can imagine no higher compliment.”

Marinette leaned in to kiss her. Their lips parted and they tasted one another ever so briefly. Then, Marinette resumed her squidlike embrace. “Today, I saw love get manipulated. Denied. Abused. Degraded. Love hurt me, and it hurt my friends. So I needed someone to remind me that love was a good thing. That it was worth fighting for.” She closed her tired eyes and rested her chin on Kagami’s shoulder. “And you came through.”

Kagami’s answer was probably thoughtful and touching, but Marinette had already dozed off.


	4. Chapter 4

“Five more minutes, mom,” Marinette said into her pillow, trying to bury her head to drown out the annoying ringing sound of her alarm.

“I’m not your mother,” her pillow answered.

Marinette was on her feet before she was awake. “Ack! Argh! How long was I--”

“Forty-five minutes.” Kagami made a slightly queasy expression and tested the damp patch of drool on her shoulder with a single finger. 

“Oh no, I’m so sorry--” Her alarm sounded again, only it wasn’t her alarm, it was her phone. 

“Tikki-sama was here to keep me company. You needed the rest.” Kagami poked her shoulder again. “Next time, I will bring a bib.”

Tikki was indeed sitting on Kagami’s shoulder, looking at Marinette’s disheveled self with concern. Marinette pretended no one was looking at her and knelt to her purse, where her phone was hidden. “It’s my parents,” she said neutrally. The panic hadn’t sunk in yet. “My parents. Who are calling because I’m playing hookie. Because the school told them I ran off campus and haven't been seen for an hour. Oh my god, I’m dead, Kagami. You’re talking to a corpse.” 

Actually, she was exaggerating. She wasn’t sure how to explain what was happening, but she knew it was worth the effort. She’d had a very good reason to leave--she’d had to save a girl from her own family. And her parents were reasonable people. Her parents listened to her.

Well,  _ one  _ parent listened to her.

She declined the call, which had come from the bakery’s landline, and immediately redialed her father’s personal mobile number

He picked up promptly. “Cupcake?” Tom asked. 

“Hi papa,” Marinette said. “I’m safe, and I’m sorry if you got worried.”

“Worried? Your mother and I were terrified! The school said you ran off campus and didn't return for over an hour. What happened?” 

Marinette extended her hand down towards Kagami, who entwined their fingers. “There’s a lot to tell you when I get back home, but the basics are that a friend of mine got outed to her extremely bigoted parents against her will. I left school because I thought she needed my help.”

“Oh cupcake,” Tom sighed. “Of course my little sweetie was trying to help her friend. But leaving school is the kind of strike that can go on your permanent disciplinary record. You can’t overreact to every rough patch your friends go through. Families can work these things out themselves, you know? As much as you wanted to help, she didn’t need it.”

Marinette sighed. Him not understanding was tolerable, but the only way she could make him understand was to lie to him. Again. She hated it, but she had no choice. “The only reason she didn’t need my help was because Ladybug got there first. When I showed up at the building, Ladybug was already swinging away with my friend in her arms. It was bad, papa, bad enough that our city’s superhero had to take a girl away from her own family..”

Sabine gasped in the background. Marinette’s parents must have put it on speaker without telling her. She was okay with that. She didn’t really want to talk to her mother right then, but she was okay with her listening. 

“Cupcake, is that why you called back on my number? You know your mother loves you--”

“I do.”

“--and you have to know that whatever those awful people did, she’d never do to you in a million years.”

Marinette’s lips tightened to a thin, determined line. “I know that. I also know that other people being worse doesn’t make her right; it just makes her less bad than them. I’ll talk to her in a month, when you, me, and Kagami share our victory croquembouche.”

“Marinette--”

“We’re done here, Papa. I know I broke the rules. I don’t regret what I did, but I’m ready to take any punishment you and mom see fit to assign. When I get home. Which will be in a few hours. I’m hanging up now.”

“I love you, Marinette,” said Tom. 

“I love you, papa. And you too, maman. Goodbye.” Marinette hung up before Sabine could respond. Looking to Kagami, she offered a wan smile. “Thanks for the support. That went better than I thought.”

Marinette lifted the hand of Kagami’s that she held, helping her girlfriend to stand. “Tikki explained Lila’s scheming. Your poise is praiseworthy, under the circumstances.”

“I hope that’s okay,” Tikki said. “Of course I’d never share a private conversation or talk about things you did on your own, but she could have gotten most of the story from Adrien anyway, so--”

“It’s fine. Perfect even. She gets to know and I don’t have to suffer through telling he-e-eer.” Marinette broke into a heavy yawn, waving her hand to show she was okay.”

“Did you sleep last night?” Kagami asked.

“Hardly,” Tikki answered.

Marinette frowned. “Thanks, Tikki.”

Tikki sensed that she was approaching a line, if not crossing it, by sharing Marinette’s private sleep schedule. Defensively, she added, “I didn’t tell her about your morning with your parents. That felt personal.”

The thoughtfulness on Tikki’s part was important. All the same, Marinette could have done without rehashing this part of the day, too. She started to rub out the stiff muscles from where she fell on her thigh, and gave her answer with her expressive face hidden away. “The full details can wait for another day, but the simple version is that maman thinks you and I are faking our relationship because we think Adrien will find it hot.”

Kagmi’s lips curled. “How insulting.”

“Worse than your mother wanting me to be your concubine?” Marinette quipped.

Kagami appeared to give the casual comment more thought than it deserved. “I’m unclear. Your mother’s dismissal is more personal, but it also leaves more room for her to be proven wrong.”

Another thought crossed Marinette’s mind. “And speaking of your mother, how much trouble are you going to get into when she finds out?”

“She won’t find out,” Kagami said. “I informed the staff that I had special training scheduled, and that my mother would hear about it if their own poor recordkeeping made me late for an excused absence. I was not exaggerating about the lengths that Anquetil Academy will go for its athletes.”

“Oh, good.” One thing off her mind, at least. Marinette gave her clothes a once-over. Dirty, but not in a way that gave away her time in an alley; the dirt on her behind could just as well have been caused by a picnic on a recently-watered park. She didn’t smell too badly, either, unless the lingering scent of the garbage had driven her completely noseblind. “Then… would you like to have some coffee or tea with me?”

“I’d like nothing more,” Kagami said with a radiant grin.

Naturally, that was when the signature chime of an akuma alert sounded from Marinette’s and Kagami’s phones. 

“Oh, come on.  _ Now?”  _ Marinette groaned. An arm around the shoulders and a kiss on the cheek moderately reduced her frustration but didn’t alleviate it completely. She tapped the alert and held the phone so both she and Kagami could see the video.

“...And Chat Noir and Ladybug are giving chase! This new villain, Mayura, seems to have met her match against Paris’s twin heroes!”

Marinette blinked. “...what?”

“A trap,” Kagami said.

“Obviously. I have to get to Chat Noir. Tikki, Spots--”

“Wait!” Kagami shouted. “A trap for him, or for you? Marinette, you’re tired, distraught, and based on how you’re walking, injured.”

Marinette took stock of herself and found that Kagami was correct, three points for three. The nap had helped, but a few minutes of rest in an alley couldn’t make up for four nights in a row of less than five hours of sleep. LIkewise, Kagami’s presence wasn’t so magical as to erase the emotional roller coaster this morning had turned out. And the bruises, well, being transformed would dull the pain, but not erase it completely. 

And yet. “What choice do I have?”

“Take me with you,” Kagami said with conviction.

Marinette closed her eyes. “And then your mother will move you to Tokyo, assuming you don’t go blind first.”

That answer lit a blaze in Kagami’s soul, and her response was filled with determination and a little bit of menace. Hands gripped Marinette’s shoulders. “My mother will let Paris burn to protect me. I will not accept the same logic from you.”

Marinette did not look up. “I’m not protecting you, Kagami. I’m protecting  _ me.  _ To lose you like that… Hawk Moth wouldn’t be able to miss my negative feelings, even from across the city.”

The hands on Marinette’s shoulders lost their strength and slid down her arms. “I… see.” Kagami inhaled and exhaled like she was meditating. However, the urgency of the situation motivated her to decide quickly. “Another hero then. I admit I was… excited… for the prospect of another battle, but that is nothing next to your safety. Rena Rouge or Carapace, or--”

“--or someone else entirely.” Marinette knew that Kagami was right, but whatever was happening on those rooftops was happening  _ right now.  _ Extricating Alya or Nino from Dupont would take time she didn’t have. “Kagami. Stay here and do not move. I’ll be back in a flash.” Pushing past her bruises, she sprinted towards the tea shop across the street.

\-----

“Mister Fu!” Marinette waved frantically, weaving between tables and nearly knocking the coffee out of a banker’s hands. “Sorry, sorry!” she said to his string of invectives, then kept moving towards her destination.

Fu was pouring himself a fresh cup of red herbal tea from a small, brown, ceramic teapot when Marinette arrived. He placed the pot on its holder, over a small candle flame, and held the cup up to savor the aromatic vapors. “Ah, Marinette. You and your… friend?”

“Girlfriend.” 

He smiled approvingly. “Girlfriend, then. You have finished your heart-to-heart?”

“Actually, I just got a call from another friend.” She spoke quickly as she could. “The one with green eyes? He’s in trouble, so I have to run, but before I go I wanted to grab something for my girlfriend from your cooler?”

He nodded. “Yes, I have many boxes of fine tea blends for your friend,” he said. “The Dragon blend is--”

“--not an option, I’m afraid. She liked it, but her mother didn’t approve.”

That broke his smile. He stroked his beard. “Then, take a look and pick one that feels best for her.” He casually, but thoroughly, scanned the customers of the store. None had line of sight to the cooler. In the clear, he lifted the lid, and Marinette looked in to see the Miracle Box open before her. 

Marinette made her choice quickly. She didn’t have time to second guess. But Master Fu did, and he put a hand on her wrist when she withdrew a certain small box from the bottom ring of shelves. “Are you certain, Marinette?”

She wasn’t certain about  _ anything  _ right now, but she was pretty sure. She nodded. “I haven’t forgotten what you’ve taught me. I know the particulars of this… ummm… tea blend. But there isn’t a better choice right now.”

He released her. “Then I will trust your judgement. And, I suppose, your girlfriend’s as well. But I should not keep you, not if your green-eyed friend needs your aid.”

“Thank you, Mister Fu!” Marinette said, bowing quickly before scampering back to the alley.

\-----

Kagami recognized the box in Marinette’s hand. “So you have chosen another hero?” she asked. 

“I did,” Marinette said, breathing heavily from the sprint. “And it’s you.”

Kagami blinked.

Marinette opened the box and held it out in her palm. The lid popped open and exposed a spiral ring of bronze, sized for a thumb. “This is the Miraculous of the Rooster, which grants the power of animation. Kagami Tsurugi, you will use it for the greater good, then return it to me.”

“Without fail,” Kagami intoned. She took the box, letting her hands linger on Marinette’s. The miraculous burst into light, and that light resolved into a small orange bird who looked more like a baby phoenix than the rooster he represented.

“Hello, I’m Orikko, and-- and you’re a  _ girl. _ ” He zipped through the air away from Kagami to get directly in Marinette’s face. “You. You have to be kidding me. You  _ know  _ that I can’t be given to a girl!”

“Orikko,” Marinette said calmly. “We don’t have time for this. The Guardian entrusted me with the decision, and this is my choice. Please, work with her. 

“I’m not sure I will work with  _ him, _ ” Kagami said. Her ice was back. Marinette didn’t hold it against her. “I am not just a  _ girl.  _ I’m a warrior, and a hero, and I will not be dismissed for my gender.”

“Look, you don’t get it,” Orikko said. “The Rooster is the quintessentially male animal--”

Kagami held up her phone, still showing the running battle between Chat Noir, whatever that Ladybug imposter was, and the fleeing Mayura. “More so than the Peacock? A woman seems to be using that power quite well.”

“Duusu’s different,” Orikko explained. "He’s about the beauty and attraction of the Peacock. But The Rooster is about the swagger. The brashness. That masculine je ne sais quoi. It doesn't go well with female wielders." He seemed almost apologetic, but that did not take the sting out of his words.

Kagami’s scowl deepened. "You think I cannot handle the power?"

"I'm terrified that you CAN," the rooster wailed, flying panicked loop-the-loops in mid air. 

Kagami stared, long and hard. “What?”

"It’s been three hundred years since my last female holder, and I never ever want to go through that again!” Orikko’s mid-air spinning grew erratic, and both Marinette and Kagami had to bob their head to dodge his wider swings. “The first thing that my last female wielder did was burn down a convent so she could run away with a nun! She kept brawling and dueling, beating down man after man. She stabbed one, nursed him back to health, and decided he was her best friend. And the opera. Heavens, the constant, incessant, OPERA! Please tell me you don’t sing, too?”

Kagami was stunned. “You were…  _ her _ ?”

“Kagami. Orikko. We don’t have  _ time  _ for this. Say ‘greet the dawn,’ and transform. Tikki, spots on!”

“Orikko, greet the dawn!”

Marinette’s transformation was intimately familiar, so she had little trouble focusing outside it to watch Kagami. 

The swordswoman made a fencing lunge, leading with the thumb with the miraculous. As she thrust, orange energy flowed backwards over her hands and the rest of her body. Her arms and legs ended up covered in flared boots and gloves. Underneath those, she wore a costume that was patterned in red with a drawing of a swashbuckler’s doublet. It was male in design, but hugged her form enough to hint at the girl wearing it. 

She stood from her attack, and swept her gloved hand across her eyes. An orange trailer coalesced into a simple strip of cloth with two eye-holes. A wider sweep traced the edge of a wide-brimmed hat. Finally, she flung her hand backwards. Three more orange streams solidified into matter, two forming the long windblown ends of her cloth mask, and the last forming a jaunty plume sticking out from her hat. 

The last step was her weapon. A simple iron bar appeared in her left hand. She held it to her lips and blew. Spiralling orange energy gathered around the tip and swirled into its final form: a weathervane, pointing in the four cardinal directions and topped with a glorious crowing rooster.

_ My very own swashbuckler,  _ Marinette thought. But the thought would have to wait. “Let’s go!” She tossed her yo-yo straight up towards the billboard that topped the nearby building. Kagami followed easily, springboarding back and forth between the two buildings. “What should I call you?”

“I… should not use Japanese, correct?”

“Right.” They reached the top of the building. The fight had last been seen half a kilometer eastward. They’d close that distance in minutes. Hopefully that wouldn’t be too long. “You want this identity to be totally distinct from Ryuuko.”

“In that case I am Girouette,” she said. “And also…”

Then she grabbed Ladybug, one hand on the back of her head, the other gripping solidly on her bottom. She dipped her low, and kissed her deeply. 

The act was over before Marinette could even decide if she was fighting it or kissing back. With miraculous strength, Girouette planted Ladybug back on her feet and leapt east. Ladybug almost missed her yo-yo toss to follow. 

“Wha… what the heck was  _ that? _ ” She asked once she’d caught up. 

Kagami rewarded her with the most infuriatingly sexy smirk that Marinette had ever seen. “Isn’t that what you wanted? To keep Ryuuko and Girouette distinct? After all,  _ Ryuuko _ would never be so risqué.”

_ Maybe I should have listened to Orikko after all,  _ Marinette thought. But despite her mental complaints, her face was as red as her costume, and she was still blushing a little when they arrived at the scene of the conflict.

\----- 

Ladybug arrived just in time, his lips inches from the clone, the clone’s hands inches away from taking Chat’s miraculous. She grabbed both by the collar and tossed them to opposite sides of the building. “Watch it, Chat, you’re confusing fantasy with reality!”

“Wait,” said Chat, who landed on his feet as easily as his namesake. “That’s not Ladybug?”

Ladybug had pulled ahead of Girouette in the race to Chat Noir’s side, but only by seconds, and she landed gracefully and Ladybug’s side. “It seems I overestimated the competition?” she sneered.

With dawning horror, Ladybug realized what her sleep-deprived mind had failed to consider in offering Kagami another miraculous. Chat didn’t  _ know.  _ She hadn’t told him. He still thought she was single, still thought he had a chance, and this monster was playing him like a fiddle. 

“Girouette,” Ladybug said, summoning the willpower of the Hero of Paris and borrowing just a little of Kagami’s own ice. “Chat’s my partner and is deserving of respect. Now is  _ not  _ the time.”

“What’s going on?” Chat said, looking back and forth between the two identical spotted heroes.

“She’s a fake!” said the fake. “Chat, listen to your heart. Please, believe in me. Believe in my feelings for you!”

“Believe in what I’ve told you  _ every  _ fight for the past ten months, Chat!” Ladybug growled. “I’m sorry. You’re the best partner a hero could ever have, but my heart lies elsewhere.”

Feigning injury, batting her blue eyes, and reaching pitiably in Chat’s direction, the copy said, “We’ve fought together for so long… you can’t believe that’s me being so  _ cold  _ to you! You know I’d never say anything so hurtful to my partner.”

“She’s right,” growled Chat, and he looked straight at Marinette with hate in his eyes that was normally reserved for when he was brainwashed.

Giroutte thrust herself in front of Ladybug, but Ladybug pushed her back and took the lead. “Chat,” she said. “If I’m the fake, where did  _ she  _ come from?” She pointed her thumb backwards at Girouette. “How’d a fake get her hands on the Miracle Box?”

Chat’s jaw dropped. “Oh, crap. Milady, I’m so--”

All three had let their guard down. The clone pounced, tackling Ladybug by the waist and driving both of them behind the upraised section of roof that housed the door. The other two heroes shouted and followed and Ladybug tossed the fake aside. She kipped to her feet. The fake did likewise. They stood on guard a meter apart, but the fake didn’t make a move. It didn’t need to. The damage had been done. “She ambushed me! That  _ proves  _ she’s the fake!” the copy said as soon as Chat and Girouette were in view. 

“Oh, come on, not again.” Ladybug rolled her eyes.

“Well, this time the fake should be easy to se _ paw _ rate from the real one,” joked Chat. “Do you love me, Ladybugs?”

“No,” they said as one.

He was hurt, but he played it off like it was nothing. “How about a kiss from each of you, to make sure?”

“Chat!” both said. Both sounded exasperated, but the real Marinette was the one who’d finally had enough.

“You know I’ve told you we can’t be together--”

“You know I’m in love with another person--”

“--and I’m so, so sorry this is how you’re finding out--”

“--and I’m so, so sorry that you can’t accept that--”

“--but I’m taken. By Girouette. We’re together, Chat.”

“--but the boy I like is… wait,  _ what?” _

Girouette was a flash of dawn, battering the fake away from the real Ladybug. The clone went flying and might have plummeted to the ground, if not for Mayura appearing out of hiding to intercept her ally. 

Girouette stood on guard between Ladybug and the villains, simmering with protective fury. “My love,” she said. “This travesty will not stand.”

“Milady?” Chat mewled.

Ladybug kept her eyes trained on the enemy--they wouldn’t get a second chance to sucker-punch her--but they were not foremost in her mind. “Chat, this wasn’t how you were meant to find out. I swear, this is  _ new.  _ I haven’t kept secrets or lied. I know it hurts, and you probably have a million questions, but right now I can’t answer them. What matters is the danger, and the opportunity. We can take out Mayura. We can turn the tides of this battle. We have her pinned and outnumbered.”

Ladybug’s sensitive ears heard the windy approach of a large body leaping through the air. Heavy boots crunched on gravel, and a painfully familiar voice answered her. “Outnumbered, is she?”

Ladybug spun and pressed her back flat against Girouette’s spine, covering her as she was covered in turn. She’d held faint hope that she’d misidentified the voice, but of course she was not so lucky. There, on the roof with them, was Hawk Moth. He brushed invisible dust off his shoulder, smirked behind his mask, and raised his cane in preparation for combat.

“Hawk Moth,” Mayura called out from the far side of the roof. “I didn’t mean--”

“I care about results, Mayura,” the villain said. “And you have gotten them. Ladybug’s miraculous is as good as ours!”

“You can’t think it will be that easy, can you, Hawk Moth?” said Ladybug, sounding braver than she felt.

“In fact, I do,” he riposted. “You see, Ladybug, by my count,  _ you’re  _ the one who’s outnumbered.” He took a slow step forward. Ladybug nervously fingered her yo-yo. “It’s you and your orange friend, versus me, Mayura, her sentimonster…” 

His smile was an open wound, slashed down to the bone. 

“...and Chat Blanc.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Rikka, cedalodon, and MiniMinou for feedback. 
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_d%27Aubigny


	5. Chapter 5

_Chat Blanc._

The name alone made Ladybug shiver. 

Her memories of Chat Blanc were spotty. The frenetic battle had lasted only minutes, and the merging of timelines had left holes in her already incomplete memories. But she could still see the cracked moon, still feel the necrotic power of his super-cataclysm, still hear him calling her name--her _real_ name--in his insane, twisted voice. 

The good news was that Chat’s costume was still black. He was holding on, though his cheeks were crimson with rage and Hawk Moth’s insignia shimmered around his face. Ladybug thought still had a chance to save him. Hawk Moth agreed; Mayura and her sentimonster began an intimidating advance, but Hawk Moth cut them off with an open palm. He knew that his tenuous hold wouldn’t survive Chat witnessing his allies assault Ladybug physically. 

The battle on the roof would have to wait. For now, the battleground was Chat Noir’s soul.

“Chat Noir, please,” Ladybug begged. “This isn’t you. This isn’t who you want to be. I know the pain of rejection, I know it first hand--”

“--and despite that, she inflicted it on you, Chat Blanc” said Hawk Moth. His own butterfly mask flared. The leather on his gloves creaked from his grip on his cane. Chat Noir was demanding all of Hawk Moth’s willpower. Good. “Months of pining for a boy, and when she finally gives him up, she doesn’t consider giving you a chance--she jumps headfirst into a new relationship.”

“It’s not like that!” Ladybug protested.

“Wasn’t it?” Chat Noir said. “You never once mentioned girls. Never once mentioned leaving your secret boy. Over and over again, ‘I’m in love with another boy.’ Was that all a lie, Ladybug?”

Hawkmoth tried to press his advantage, “Of course it was--”, but Ladybug wouldn’t cede ground so easily.

“No! Never!” Ladybug clasped her hands over her heart. “There _was_ a boy for a long time, Chat Noir. And even if there hadn’t been a boy, we’d have been stuck because of our identities. But that’s not the important part.”

“So my feelings aren’t important?” Chat growled.

Girouette added her experience of multiple akumatizations to the conflict. “Those aren’t your words, Chat Noir. That’s Hawk Moth speaking though you and twisting Ladybug’s meaning. Ladybug is a great hero and your partner. Listen to her.”

Chat’s green glare towards Girouette was venomous. Nevertheless, he stopped to listen.

Ladybug wanted to kiss her girlfriend for her kindness, but that would have been the worst possible action under the circumstances. She instead looked Chat dead in the eye. “The important part is this: I’ve never, ever lied to you about how much you mean to me. It’s not the type of love you want, Chat, but it’s still love. You’re my partner and my friend and it rends my soul to know I’m hurting you.”

“She says that,” Hawk Moth said with manipulative ease, “while she gives her heart to a temporary hero and doesn’t bother to tell you--”

“She’s not just a temporary hero! She’s so much more--” Marinette realized too late that she was speaking in her own voice and not Ladybug’s. Defending Kagami was fast becoming instinctual, but this was the wrong time. The butterfly outline flared brighter. “Chat Noir--”

Chat hadn’t given in. Not yet. But when he lowered himself to all fours and crawled towards Girouette with animalistic, predatory smoothness, Ladybug could tell he was close. “So let’s hear it from the source,” he said. “Let’s hear what this bug-stealing chicken has to say. I want to know this, Girouette…”

“Yes,” gloated Hawk Moth. “Show her your hatred, Chat Blanc. Confront her. Let her feel your betrayal!”

Ladybug put her hand on Girouette’s wrist just in time to stop her from raising her weapon to a ready guard. The two girls met gazes out of the corner of her eyes, and Marinette gave a minute shake of the head. Trusting her, Kagami let the weather vane drop limply to her side. 

“Chat Noir,” she said. “Ask your question.”

“What I want to know,” he hissed, “is if you really think you can make her happy.”

Hawk Moth snarled in anger. “ _Your_ happiness is has been cast aside--”

“Shove it!” Chat shouted. “You wanted me to confront her, Hawk Moth, and that’s what I’m doing. Don’t interrupt.”

“Impudent--”

“I said _shove it!_ ” he screamed again. But Hawk Moth’s provocation had riled his anger. He launched forward, grabbing Girouette by the shoulders and slamming her backwards into the locked door that led down to the building. 

“Giroutte, don’t fight!” Ladybug called out. 

Girouette complied. 

“Do you really think you can make her happy?” Chat growled. His face, and the failing, flickering glow of Hawk Moth’s power, was centimeters away from Kagami’s.

“I will, or I will die trying,” Girouette answered without hesitation.

“Swear it.”

“She’s lying!” Hawk Moth insisted, a final, futile attempt to turn the hero, but Chat was having none of it. 

“Last warning, Hawk Moth. Shove it. Girouette, _swear_!” he repeated.

“I swear,” said Girouette. She met his deadly green eyes directly. “I swear on my name. I swear on my sword. I swear on my soul. I will keep her happy for as long as she will have me. I will stay by her side and guard her happiness in this life, and in the next. This I swear, by everything I’ve ever held dear.”

Hawk Moth voiced some kind of objection, but Ladybug couldn’t hear it over the thundering of her pulse in her ears. 

Chat Noir’s whole body strained against himself for a few moments. Then he want slack, head and hands drooping, freeing Girouette from where he’d pinned her. “Then I guess… no matter how much it hurts… I can’t really despair, can I?”

“Hawk Moth,” Mayura whispered. At some point she and her partner had closed the gap between them. “We should go--” he warning was interrupted by a coughing fit. Hawk Moth dashed to her side and supported her with one arm.

The butterfly on his face, weak though it was, stayed in place.

“No,” he said. “No. I can sense Chat Noir’s emotions. He’s still brimming with an all-consuming negativity. He will turn!”

Chat Noir didn’t move. He did, however, begin to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Hawk Moth demanded. 

“All consuming negativity, huh?” He talked with the bleak humor of a man walking to the gallows. “Yeah, that’s about right. You see, Hawky-boy, I still love my bugaboo. Even after all this, I love her to bits. But _someone_ just tried to _use_ that love. They tried to twist my feelings against her. _Twice!_ ”

He slowly turned to face the villain team and flexed his claws. Entropic Cataclysm energy was seeping out of the joints of his knuckles, even though he hadn’t called for it. Ladybug didn’t know what that implied, but it couldn’t be good. 

“Let me tell you, Hawky-boy, LB and I spent a lot of time talking about you, and you presented a heck of a dilemma. What do we do when we beat you? We’re heroes--how do we serve justice? We considered regular prison, international jails, even setting up a magical containment cell that we’d personally warden.” He stretched his claws, then flexed them again. His knuckles cracked. 

“Right now, though? I’m thinking, screw justice. Prison’s too good for you.” Chat pointed one seething claw at Hawk Moth. “I’m thinking that I should Cataclysm you, nice and slow. That I should make some popcorn and spend a few hours watching you die. That I should sit back and enjoy the sound of your screams as my power tears you apart, cell, by cell, by cell.”

He took another step forward, and while his costume was black, his grin was pure Blanc. “That’s the all-consuming emotion you’d be evilizing, Hawky-boy. Pure, unmitigated hatred of _you._ So, do you think you can take command of the supervillain we’d make? Think you can control him? Then prove it. Akumatize me. Do it!” He screamed, sending flecks of spittle into the air. “I want you to do it! Evilize me! Come on, do it. I want you to. C’mon. Hit me with your akuma. C’mon, hit me. Hit me!”

The dark energy of akumatization bubbled up around Chat’s mask. However, Hawk Moth’s gloating grin was gone, replaced by a rictus of rage. The muscles in his jaw bulged.. He raised his cane over his head with both hands, bellowed, and smote the ground, punching a wide hole into the roof they stood upon. Then he pulled his cane back against invisible resistance, like an angler wrestling a massive fish.

Chat’s knees buckled. He’d temporarily commandeered the Akuma, but it finally heeded the call of it’s master, bursting free of Chat’s bell and fluttering out of sight past the edge of the building. 

“Hawk Moth, we need to leave!” said Mayura, unstable without Hawk Moth’s support. 

“Cataclysm!” Chat called, and his dark power answered before he completed the call. He leapt straight for Hawk Moth, going for the kill. 

The clone ladybug flung herself in his path. His claws plunged into her chest.

She weakly reached a hand out to touch his face. “Chat… I… forgive you…” she said, before falling to dust. He staggered back clutching at his chest. 

Marinette was at his side in an instant. “It wasn’t me!” she yelled, grabbing him by his shoulders. “It was a horrible trick, a bad dream. I’m right here, Chat.”

They were focused on each other, and they both lost sight of the fight. And Hawk Moth, despicable by nature, was perfectly willing to take advantage of Chat’s vulnerability. Paris’s heroes were defenseless. 

Thankfully, they weren’t alone. 

Girouette threw herself in front of Chat Noir and parried Hawk Moth’s cleave, then launched a swinging riposte that sent him hopping backwards. She used the breather to slap the points of her weathervane, spinning into a blur. The whirling tines detached from the central spike and latched onto her left forearm, forming a buckler and leaving an unadorned spike with which to thrust. So armed and armored, she stood ready against Hawk Moth’s next attack.

The attack never came. His neon butterfly surrounded his face again, and he showed his teeth. “Yes, perfect! Mayura. We’re leaving.” He grabbed the infirm villain in his arms, bent his legs, and he leapt in too many directions at once. 

Seven copies of Hawk Moth and Mayura escaped by seven different paths. One landed on the ground, carrying his Mayura through a copse of trees in a nearby park. Two leapt onto a nearby billboard and then fled in opposite directions from its top. Four more heaved themselves onto a church steeple, with three forking their flights off to different rooftops and the last sliding down the sloping roof like he was skiing.

“See to Chat,” Girouette said with steely resolve, heading for the roof’s edge. She reassembled her weapon and held the still-twirling vane into the air. Her power’s name, “Wake-up Call!” was accompanied by the crowing of a rooster, and orange beams flew out in the four cardinal directions.

When the Rooster called upon the world to wake, it woke. The Hawk Moth in the trees was grabbed by a large oak, whereupon he dissolved into smoke. A billboard folded in on itself like a bear trap to destroy another one of the illusions, and third suffered a crushing demise under a bodyslam from a walking AC condenser. That left the four who had ran towards the church. 

“Girouette, no!” cried Ladybug, but Girouette gave chase without heed. When she landed on the steeple, the rusted cockerel on the church’s weather vane tore itself from its moorings and took to the air alongside its mistress. 

Ladybug check in quickly on her partner. “Chat, are you--”

“I’m fine.” He brushed off her support, emotions in check again. For the moment. “We have to get her back!” He crouched with his staff, ready to pogo after their wayward teammate. 

Before he could, a brick wall, twenty meters high, rose into existence on the building’s edge.

“And where do you think _you’re_ going?” taunted Hawk Moth’s latest minion, her words emerging from nowhere in particular. 

Marinette never, ever cursed. As herself, she was too polite for such crassness; as Ladybug she had an example to set for the city. But today, she couldn’t help herself. 

“Volpina?” she screamed into the air. “Are you _shitting_ me?”

“Aww, did you miss me?” the fox villain taunted.

Ladybug screamed again, then threw her yo-yo skyward. “Lucky charm!”

A small plastic crescent landed in her palm. “A mouth guard?” Chat asked. “What are you supposed to do with that?”

“Come up with any plan you’d like,” Volpina said. Twelve of them appeared at once on the rooftop, tapping their long weaponized flutes against their palms in perfect synchronicity. One sauntered up to the heroes with mocking swagger, while the other eleven circled them from all sides. “You’ll never beat me. I’ve got you surrounded and pinned, and I don’t have a five-minute timer like that pathetic knock-off version of me who you cart along on your easy missions. My illusions can go on forever!”

As if to emphasize her point, Chat’s ring beeped. He looked at in, grimaced, and started spinning his staff. “Which is the real her?”

Ladybug’s eyes flicked from side to side. A copy was ready to pounce from directly behind; two more had the high ground from raised portions of the roof; and copies stood on all four edges of the wall to intercept escape. “If _any_ of them are real,” she said. “The original might still be hiding?”

“That’s right,” the Volpina’s gloated. “Am I behind you? To the left? To the right?”

Ladybug looked at the mouth guard in her hand. 

Then she smiled. It was not a nice smile. Some days, even Ladybug couldn’t be nice. “Or,” she asked, “Maybe you counted on me being distracted by illusions. Maybe you gambled on me _assuming_ that you were hiding, because your smug self couldn’t resist a chance to brag straight to my face.” 

Ladybug popped the mouth guard over her teeth, banged her knuckles together in a boxing stance, and threw a punch straight at the Volpina in front of her. The meaty _thwack_ of her knuckles connecting with Volpina’s nose was the most wondrous sound Ladybug had ever heard. 

“Chat, don leh ‘er ‘llusion mek muh lose ‘er!” Ladybug mumbled through the guard, ducking under a staff swing and popping off another jab straight in Volpina’s head.

Chat understood the garbled command and obeyed, swinging his staff wide. “On it, milady!” He stumbled, stricken by his own words, but then he recovered and popped another clone before it could swap places with the original. “I mean, on it, LB.” 

Ladybug didn’t have breathing room to comfort Chat. She fell into a simple rhythm of punch, duck, punch again, keeping as close as possible to Volpina to deny her the reach advantage of the flute-staff. Ladybug only had one opportunity--two or three seconds was all Volpina needed to blow on her flute and disappear, so she had to maintain a constant assault. Weave, punch, jab, weave. Body blow, hook, jab, body blow. 

Volpina made a wild swing at head height, and Ladybug ducked again. Her follow-up uppercut didn’t connect. Volpina bent over backwards, literally, and launched into a double handspring to clear the space between them. “You missed!” she gloated from three meters away, and with a few musical notes, the space between them was filled with illusionary copies. 

Ladybug spat out her mouthpiece. “Did I?” she asked. She held out the fox necklace, freshly ripped from Volpina’s neck, and took a moment to enjoy Volpina’s look of utter surprise before she snapped it between her fingers. 

A sweep of her yo-yo purified the Akuma. Another left Lila neatly trussed, because there was no way she had been in the neighborhood by pure coincidence. But then she left the Italian girl, and her partner, and sprinted towards the edge of the roof facing the church next door. “Girouette!” she hollered. No answer. Terror squeezed her heart with icy fingers. “Girouette!”

Girouette’s voice--Kagami’s voice--rose to greet her from the ground. “I’m here, Ladybug.” She made a few well-placed jumps off eaves and sills, and joined Marinette on the roof. “I’m sorry, I allowed them to escape--”

Ladybug charged her with a hug that would have crushed a non-hero. “Don’t ever, _ever_ do that again!” she wailed. 

“I can defend myself, Ladybug,” she answered, though not unkindly. Her fingers stroked through Ladybug’s hair. “I had them on the run. They both used their powers--if I’d kept on them, their time limits would have run out before mine--”

“They don’t have time limits!” Marinette sobbed. 

Kagami froze in place. “They… don’t?”

Marinette was holding it together, but only barely, and her words emerged slowly from the heavy blanket of emotion. “If… if you’d caught them, you’d have detransformed. And it would have been you, collège girl you, against Hawk Moth, and… _don’t ever do that again!”_

Girouette’s only answer was to tremble in her love’s arms. 

“Gi--Girouette,” Chat said, hesitantly. “Before you beat yourself up about making a mistake. I should say… thanks. For what you said. He’d have gotten me, without you.”

Girouette closed her eyes and breathed. Then she gave Ladybug a peck on the cheek and took a tremulous step in Chat’s direction. “And I should tell you that everything I swore--”

“You shouldn’t tell me, actually.” Chat was staring at the sky, not looking at either of the girls.

Girouette adjusted her hat. Kagami was not normally a fidgeter, but today was a day for exceptions. “I shouldn’t?”

“I needed to hear what you said at the time, but now that my head’s a little clearer… it shouldn’t matter to me if it’s true.” The ears to his costume twitched. “It shouldn’t matter whether you’re her eternal soulmate or her one-night experiment. It only matters that she made a choice. Because she gets to choose, you know?”

“She does,” Girouette said with a slight nod. 

Chat wet his lips. “Even if her choice hurts. Even if I wish she’d choose differently. As long as you’re not using her, trying to hurt her intentionally--you’re not, right? If you are, let me know, and I’ll save us all a bunch of trouble by Cataclysming you here and now.”

Girouette laughed, taking the threat as pure humor. Ladybug wasn’t as confident it was a joke, but didn’t intervene when her girlfriend said, “I assure you that no such measures will be required.”

He smiled. “...then as long as she’s happy right now, the true measure of your oath is a private matter for you and her.”

“As you say.” Girouette held out her hand. Chat accepted the handshake. “You are a hero, Chat Noir. My rude comments earlier were uncalled for.”

“Nah, I was pretty dumb to fall for the sentimonster’s lines. I just wanted to believe it really bad, you know?” He shook tears out of his eyes. Chat’s ring beeped, and Girouette and Ladybug beeped shortly after. Chat cleared his throat. “Anyway, Ladybug. I know you like to tie up loose ends, but right now you’ve got a loose end that maybe should be _un_ tied?” he said with a pale imitation of his normal humor. 

“Lila,” Ladybug whispered, looking at the bound girl a few meters away.

Lila saw their shift at attention and addressed the heroes. “Oh, my, Ladybug, what on earth happened?” she said innocently. “How did I get here? Was I akumatized again?”

Ladybug crossed the roof in a bounding leap and lifted Lila by the collar. “Oh, please. You expect me to believe you just _happened_ to show up to a battle with Hawk Moth that’s halfway across the city?”

Lila replied with honeyed words and a glint of evil in her eye. “Oh, no, you can’t possibly be implying what I think you’re implying! To say I’m a collaborator just because I was akumatized twice?”

Ladybug’s eyes opened wide. “That’s not what I--”

Underterred, Lila talked over her. “If those rumor gets around Paris, you’ll start a witch hunt. The poor victims who’s been repeatedly akumatized, people like me and Rose and Juleka. Haven’t those two been through enough, without you casting a shadow of suspicion on them?”

“Why you little…!” Ladybug shouted. She dropped her hard on the roof, and Chat had to hold her back from throttling her.

“Hey LB,” he said. “Can…” his voice hitched, and his pain popped the bubble of Ladybug’s furor. “...can I borrow the Horse Miraculous?”

Ladybug went limp in his grasp. “Anything, Chat. But why?”

“I could use a few hours out of the city. All of Paris reminds me of you, and I don’t want to be here when I’m… vulnerable.”

From the corner of her eye, Ladybug saw Lila grin, as if she enjoyed seeing the superheroes in pain. 

“And also, she’s right. We can’t have those rumors spreading around Paris,” Chat said, grinning right back at the liar. “ _Rome_ , on the other hand, is another matter entirely." 

Watching Lila’s face transform from glee to horror brought Ladybug indescribable happiness. “What are you talking about?" the brown-haired girl said.

Chat gloated like he'd caught a canary. "What I'm talking about, is that I’m sure the Palazzo Chigi can find a few minutes to talk with a visiting superhero, and they will _love_ to hear about the trouble their junior diplomatic corps is getting into.”

"You wouldn't dare!"

He saluted her. “Would, and will, little lying Lila. Enjoy your last days in France!”

Another round of beeping miraculouses preempted any further arguing with Lila, so Marinette unspun the captive and let her tumble to the ground. “Chat, head to…” She whispered the name of Master Fu’s boulangerie into his ear. Once he was on his way, she used the mouthguard to summon her Miraculous Ladybugs, restoring all the damage caused by Girouette’s power with the unfortunate side effect of also healing Lila’s bruises. Then, she took Girouette’s wrist and led them to a quiet rooftop in the opposite direction. 

Kagami handed over the Rooster the instant she transformed.

“You’ll need it to get back down,” Marinette demurred.

Kagami thrust it back in Marinette’s direction. “Orikko was right. I cannot blame my errors solely on the brashness of the Rooster, but it amplified my worst traits. I could have been killed, or worse.”

Marinette accepted the miraculous back. She tried very hard not to think about what ‘or worse’ could imply. She sat down with her legs casually crossed. Kagami took a more formal Japanese seat on tucked knees. “My oath, on the rooftop--”

“You meant it,” Marinette said. “I could tell as soon as I heard. The decision to say it out loud… that might have been a bit of Orikko’s magic, I think. But the words were all Kagami. I’m… honored to have earned so much love from you so quickly. It’s humbling.” 

Left unspoken was that Marinette reciprocated only a fraction of Kagami’s feelings. Kagami already knew that. No need to add salt to the wound.

Kagami stared at her knees. “I intended to downplay it. To leave room for you to ignore the weight of my words. To ease you in to how quickly and deeply I’ve fallen for you. But… you see through me, Marinette.”

Such weakness was troubling, coming from Kagami of all people. Marinette could name many possible causes, but couldn’t narrow it down to one. Was it guilt over Chat Noir’s shattered heart? The aftermath of her near brush with death? The fear that her confession would lead Marinette to flee?

In the end, it didn’t matter. The answer was still the same. 

“I see through you, Kagami,” she said, and she leaned in to graze her forehead with a feather-light kiss. “And I haven’t gone anywhere.”

“Seeing the challenges that Ladybug faces, the strength of the bonds she’s forged, and contrasting that with abruptness of my arrival in your life… seeing how much Chat Noir loves you… it’s hard for me to accept that you’re choosing to stay with me, especially after all of this.” Kagami whispered.

“Then I’ll hold you until you can’t deny it.” Marinette pulled her into a close embrace. “Kagami… I’m _here_.”

“...I love you, Marinette,” Kagami whispered into her ear.

Kagami’s own short hair tickled Marinette’s forehead as she pressed their cheeks together. Whispering back, she said, “I know.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Cedalodon and MegaLoser for the feedback. [Head to this Discord](https://discord.gg/MhRvT6) for Miraculous Fanfiction hangouts!
> 
> Thanks also to Chris Nolan and Heath Ledger for the best Joker cinema has ever seen.
> 
> I called this the penultimate story, but I lied; there will be two more stories in the Seeing One Another series. Make sure you're following me or the series so you get updated when I post the real penultimate installment, Blind Date, in the near future. Thanks for reading!


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